The Effectiveness Of The Training Of Listening Strategies

In China, listening comprehension (LC) is a relatively new requirement in high school English teaching. Although its importance has been widely recognized and targeted goals have been clearly defined, the effective teaching and learning of LC in high school remains problematic. This thesis explores some new approaches that can enhance listening comprehension learning and teaching in high school. Its main assumption is that the current LC teaching in high school tends to be too simplistic, unstructured, and poorly informed by theory; a much better results can be achieved by employing listening strategy training that is suitable for high school students. It is the central goal of this exploratory study to identify and test those strategies. With a designed classroom experiment, the study sheds lights on how effective listening strategies can be designed and trained in a high school context. Through designed training, this study has found listening strategy training can be incorporated into high school English teaching and the effectiveness is the following:1. The students have gained better understanding of the wider range of listening strategies, including meta-cognitive, cognitive, and social and affective strategies.2. The students are able to employ much more effective listening strategies in improving their listening ability.3. The students have gained a higher level of listening strategy awareness. The effective listening strategies might also be useful skills in other areas of language learning (e.g. reading), as well as studies in other subjects. In terms of strategies suitable to high school English teaching context and the effectiveness of the strategies, this study has found:1. Mega-cognitive listening strategies are not easy to be adapted by trained students within a short term, while the students tends to adapt much more easily to those cognitive and social and affective listening strategies.2. There are differences among the usage of cognitive listening strategies. Some strategies that require the application of knowledge of language and grammar are not easy to train within a short period.